Site Mobile Navigation

Skilled at Seeing Surprises, Most of the Time

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — No one would give Barrett Jones a straight answer, and this visibly bothered him.

Jones, the Alabama center, wore clean khaki pants and a crisp button-down shirt, with his blond hair neatly swept across his forehead. It was midmorning recently, as Jones and Josh Maxson, Alabama’s associate communications director, drove to a speaking engagement that Jones still did not fully comprehend.

Jones had stopped athletic department staff members for details. No one knew or would say. Jones knew he would speak for about three minutes to students with CrossingPoints, a university program that helps special needs students. That was the truth, but not the whole truth. Maxson’s vagueness had tipped Jones that there had to be more.

They arrived, and Jones burst into the room smiling. There were television cameras in the back of the classroom, and when he saw them he tugged on his shirt, and then spoke of adversity, how Alabama had overcome it to beat Louisiana State for last season’s national championship.

The students loved it. They applauded and whooped, and, when he was finished, a CrossingPoints supervisor calmed them and said, “Barrett, we have a special surprise for you as well.”

Photo

Alabama center Barrett Jones has had to adapt quickly to different positions.Credit
Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

Jones’s face turned red. His hand on his hip, he looked as he had in the car. “I’m nervous,” he said. “I don’t like surprises.”

His younger brothers will tell you that the reason Jones now plays center, his third position in three years, is so he can boss around the entire offensive line. If Harrison, a teammate at Alabama, and Walker, who is committed there as well, ever mis-stepped, Jones often corrected them before their father could. They will tell you that Jones did it for their own good.

In meetings, Jones sits in the same chair, keeps his notes on the same side of his desk and his pen in the same spot, said Chance Warmack, Alabama’s left guard, who often takes Jones’s pen to elicit a reaction.

Jones had been comfortable, winning separate national championships starting at right guard and left tackle, positions with their own intelligence, discipline and footwork. “It’s like tying your shoes with your left hand if you’re right-handed,” Warmack said. In that sense Jones has become ambidextrous, considered among the best — at guard, then tackle, and now center — without what others would consider enough sufficient time to master the intricacies.

“He has the size, and the makeup, and the ability to really play any position on the offensive line, and he has the adaptability to do it, too,” said his coach, Nick Saban, who has called Jones among the top five players he has coached. “And he has the psychological disposition that it doesn’t bother him.”

Jones had been a stout, dependable right guard, which required a quick first step, strong hands and cunning wit. Jones blocked defensive tackles outweighing him by 20 to 30 pounds in tight quarters, as if in a telephone booth. He started every game as a redshirt freshman in 2009, and Alabama won a national championship.

Photo

In addition to being a student of the game, Barrett Jones volunteers, as he did in 2011 in Haiti to build a basketball court.Credit
Courtesy of Leslie Jones

He played another season at right guard, but when James Carpenter was taken in the first round of the N.F.L. draft, Saban asked Jones to take his spot at left tackle. Jones relished the challenge.

Jones blocked the opponents’ best athletes — defensive ends who lined up wide of him and ran like linebackers — with no help, knowing that if he were to fail, his quarterback would be blindsided. If he backpedaled, he would lose ground. If he turned and ran out wide, he would lose the race. It was not natural, but like most great tackles, he trained to point his left toe to the sideline and his right toe upfield, and kick-slide out and back at an angle.

“It’s like a math game in your head,” Jones said. “You’re trying to think, how wide is he? Where’s the quarterback? So where’s the closest point I can meet him?”

Jones won the Outland Trophy, awarded to the nation’s best interior lineman, and Alabama won another national championship. But when William Vlachos, a three-year starter at center, graduated and the young, talented left tackle Cyrus Kouandjio proved himself ready, Saban asked Jones to move to center.

Only now, five games into his fifth-year senior season, is Jones comfortable there.

Well before he gets in his stance, Jones has studied and memorized the defense’s formations and schemes, depending on how Alabama is aligned. He calls out a blocking combination — using about 100 code words — and echoes the call to his guards and tackles.

On running plays, Jones designates the “Mike,” traditionally, but not always, the middle linebacker. Whichever defender it is, and whichever blocking scheme is called to stop him, affects each blocker’s assignment and movement.

Jones will tell you that absorbing difficult material as an accounting major trained him to calculate and extrapolate on the field. He graduated with a 4.0 G.P.A. in June and is working toward his master’s in accounting.

In a road game, when opposing crowds make it difficult to hear snap counts, he bends and looks between his knees waiting for quarterback A. J. McCarron to lift his leg, letting him know to hike the ball. In those few seconds with his head down, defenses shift, either disguising or revealing their true positioning.

“I hate that,” Jones said. “They’re just never sitting still.”

But the Alabama guards, like Warmack, communicate adjustments so he is not entirely surprised. With his head down, Jones hears the new code words and envisions how the defense has changed.

His mother will tell you that Jones developed discipline while learning the violin at 3 at his Baptist church in suburban Memphis. Until he turned 13, he practiced for about an hour a day, positioning the violin and his body correctly as he played music by Beethoven and Bach.

In high school, Jones brought his violin on local mission trips, but now he plays only when someone challenges him.

Shortly after the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, Jones spent his spring break there. He returned in 2011 and helped build a basketball court with his family. This past spring, he visited three schools and an orphanage in Nicaragua, with about 30 family members and friends, teaching religion and playing with the children.

Video

Barrett Jones Plays the Violin

Barrett Jones, now a center for Alabama, playing the violin in the fifth grade at age 10.

It was hardest in 2010, when he and a few friends flew into the Dominican Republic and rode in the back of a truck into Haiti to help. The roads were dusty and rocky, so they wore masks and stood for about seven hours, because it was too uncomfortable to sit.

Each time Jones snaps the ball and lifts his head, there may be a defender six inches from his face. But once the ball is snapped, Jones immediately shuffles backward, buying himself a split second to see the realigned defense and gain his bearings.

His father, Rex, will tell you that Jones polished his footwork playing basketball. Standing 6-foot-5 as an eighth-grader, Jones could pivot by defenders. As he gained about 20 pounds a year in high school, Jones stayed nimble enough to shift his weight, stay low, dribble past defenders and dunk.

When he stopped growing, Jones focused on football. From then on, he would do his job: the quarterback would throw a touchdown pass, the crowd would go wild, and Jones’s skill would go mostly unnoticed.

In the classroom with the CrossingPoints students, about 40 students, Alabama fans, news media members, and others watched Jones squirm. Seconds felt like minutes until Jay Barker, the quarterback of Alabama’s 1992 national championship team, opened the door and announced that Jones had been named to the Allstate AFCA Good Works Team for his community service. Only 11 Football Bowl Subdivision players made the team. Jones exhaled.

“Thanks, I’m very grateful,” Jones said. “I don’t think this is why you should do community ... ” The students cheered and cut him off, though he did not mind.

Afterward, seeming more at ease, Jones said: “I love serving, and I also love sharing my faith. I love doing that kind of stuff. It really is a big part of who I am and something I plan on doing my whole life.”

As they walked back to the car, Jones chided Maxson for not warning him.

“That’s why they call it a surprise, Barrett,” Maxson said with a laugh. Jones shook his head.

A version of this article appears in print on October 13, 2012, on page D4 of the New York edition with the headline: Skilled at Seeing Surprises, Player Misses One Off Field. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe